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Magnifica Humanitas: Pope Leo Says No to AI Waging War

Magnifica Humanitas: Pope Leo Says No to AI Waging War

Last updated on: June 12, 2026 at 10:03 am by Rebecca Hamilton

Magnifica Humanitas: Pope Leo Says No to AI Waging War 2026-06-12T10:03:07-06:00 Rebecca Hamilton

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It is much easier to start a war than stop it.

Pope Leo XIV

AI is going to automate most of our human existence. In fact, AI will end up removing human beings from much of human activity.

We may soon live in a society that is run by machines. One of the questions we haven’t addressed, much less answered, is will we also end up fighting for survival in a society that is run for machines?

Humanity’s darkest endeavor is war. World War I and World War II showed us what industrialized warfare could do to humanity. The weapons we have now make the weapons our grandparents and great grandparents used in those wars look like something that was built with Legos.

Giving AI the power to wage war leads to a dark future.

Handing war making over to AI would be an exponential leap into a much darker future than anything humanity has ever known or dreamed of. I doubt if our nightmares can do it justice.

Science fiction has repeatedly warned us of the specter giving war making control into the hands of computers. The idea that machines could wage war on their own initiative, that they might have the power to override human intervention in their war-making decisions, was once the stuff of exciting movies.

Now, it is becoming a reality.

Change has great as AI is bringing always hurts and destroys people.

AI is an epochal change agent. It has the potential to extend humanity’s reach, to allow us to leapfrog our current rate of scientific and technological advancement and move forward at a pace humanity has never experienced before.

But power of that magnitude is always a two-edged sword, and change that amounts to the overturning of the systems of labor, commerce and social interaction on which our societies and nations are built is going to inflict dislocation, confusion and pain on a mass scale.

To put it bluntly, a lot of people are going to be crushed under the wheels of this soulless, commercially-driven, uncaring change.

Pope Leo is the only world leader with the courage and morals to say people are more important than machines.

The only world leader who has the foresight, courage and basic morals to speak for the preservation of human life and the welfare of ordinary human beings as this change comes down is Pope Leo. He has taken what is going to become an increasingly revolutionary position that individual human beings matter, that people, including the poorest and weakest people, matter more than machines.

He imposes Christian moral understanding on a discussion that has, up until now, been held entirely outside the world of morality, justice or concern for any human beings except the morbidly wealthy.

A culture of power, driving by demonizing ambition.

He says that a few very wealthy and powerful people are developing AI for what they believe is their own profit and benefit in a culture of power, driven by dehumanizing ambition.

From Magnifica Humanitas:

In our time, a culture of power is taking hold, in which the availability of resources and the ability to dominate tend to dictate the agenda and criteria for decision-making.

… The Holy See has recently observed that the growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more “feasible” and less subject to human control.

… Sometimes there is talk of “artificial moral agents,” as if machines were able to distinguish between right and wrong with greater consistency than a human being. Yet moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person. Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable. AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict; indeed it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data. In this way, it will accustom us to the idea that violence is inevitable and needs only to be optimized.

Anthropic attacked by Trump because they would not allow their AI to launch missiles without human input and wouldn’t allow their AI to put Americans under surveillance.

Allowing AI to decide when to launch missiles and then actually launch those missiles without human consent or input is not science fiction. It is a reality we are grappling with right now.

The AI developer Anthropic was recently attacked and defamed by the Secretary of Defense and President Trump. Trump, in one of his typical overreaches of power, had Anthropic’s government contracts cancelled and had them put on the list of companies which were a danger to the United States.

Why was Anthropic attacked by the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States? Because they refused to allow their AI to be used to fire missiles at civilian populations without any human controls, and because they also refused to use their AI to put the American people under surveillance.

This wasn’t the plot of a science fiction movie. It happened a few weeks ago.

So, the Holy Father isn’t scare mongering. He’s actually going easy.

Concrete criteria of personal responsibility must be put in place.

One of the most fearful things about the way AI is being developed is that the Supreme Court and our rogue “Justice” Department have created what amounts to a lawless class of people. The way our government is working right now, right wing billionaires are not held accountable to any law no matter what they do.

No one — no one — is even attempting to develop regulations and statutes which hold the developers of AI responsible for the impact the things they are creating will have human life. The only AI developer who appears to have voluntarily decided to consider the future of humanity in how it develops its AI is Anthropic.

From Magnifica Humanitas:

It is not enough to invoke a generic type of ethics. Concrete criteria for discernment must be established. The first such criterion concerns personal responsibility. When a decision to strike becomes automated or opaque, the risk of abdicating responsibility increases. For this reason, the chain of responsibility must be identifiable and verifiable; those who design, train, authorize and employ technology must be held accountable for their decisions.

These criteria give rise to certain non-negotiable requirements. First, all systems used in a war setting must guarantee the possibility of retracing and reconstructing decision-making processes, so that accountability and blame are not collapsed into “the machine.” Second, the decision to use lethal force cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes, but must remain under effective, self-aware and responsible human control. Finally, it is imperative to establish a shared framework — also at the international level — in order to curb the technological arms race and ensure robust protection for civilians and the infrastructures necessary for their survival.

Pope Leo is telling us that the developers of AI, and the corporations and world leaders who employ it must not be allowed to say “the machine did it, so there’s nobody at fault” if the system they create or employ kills millions of innocent people.

Human beings create AI. Human beings develop AI. Human beings employ AI. And human beings must be held accountable for what their AI does to other human beings.

We are regressing from the idea that preserving the human race is an absolute moral imperative.

Pope Leo tells us that we are regressing from the turning point of the twentieth century. After World War II, humanity took a hard turn away from total war. They developed alliances, institutions and understanding which has kept us from blowing ourselves out of existence for over 80 years.

All of this was based on a profound and universal moral belief that preserving humanity was the first imperative. All nations shared this understanding. That’s why nuclear weapons have not been deployed.

Now, we’re undoing those alliances and institutions and putting ourselves under the control of a few men whose sole value appears to be despotic greed that only serves itself.

We are replacing the universal understanding that preserving the continued existence of humanity is the first imperative of government with a culture of power, driven by dehumanizing ambition.

Pope Leo says that we are deluding ourselves by thinking that the two world wars can never happen again. At the same time, we are creating the same types of situations that led up to those cataclysms and allowed them to happen.

Automated war in the hands of AI that is put in place by a few twisted people whose only god is greed and who are never in any way held accountable for anything they do is an existential threat to the survival of the human race.

There is a way out. Pope Leo teaches us about that in the last section of Chapter 5 of Magnifica Humanitas.

We’ll take that up tomorrow.

Peace.

Note: The emphasis in the quotes from Magnifica Humanitas that I used in this post are mine.

Pope Leo XIV

Sanctity of Human Life

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